Indie Gamer Chick

High Gravity Wells

Well here it is, my 100th review.  Okay, so I didn’t do Fortress Craft or any legendary Xbox Live Indie Game like I thought I should to commemorate the occasion, but really, it’s not that big a deal.  Besides, I was challenged to do High Gravity Wells, and I pride myself on putting developer challenges first.  Oh, and to the guy who did Kobold’s Quest, I really am going to get to it as soon as I can round-up four players.  ETA for review: roughly 2013.  Anyway, my 100th review shall be High Gravity Wells, a space-physics puzzler-slash-reflex tester.  Well actually it’s my 101st if you count the two-in-one Platformance review, but fuck that.  Two-in-one still counts as one in my books, and if it doesn’t, um, go back to Russia or something, Pinko.

In High Gravity Wells, you try to steer a spaceship into an exit.  Like Mr. Gravity, you have no direct control over your character.  Instead, you have to activate as many as four different gravity wells and slingshot your ship towards the goal.  Each of the four face buttons corresponds to a well.  If you hold the button down, your ship will get sucked in and rocket back and forth in it until you let go.  You can also lightly tap the buttons to gently nudge gravity, although I really stunk at doing that.  Along the way, you’ll also encounter asteroids which blow you up if you run into them, black holes that suck you in (but oddly enough don’t kill you.. way to downplay the most destructive force in universe), and things that look kind of like semen geysers that repel you.

The controls are a huge pain in the ass, but actually that’s kind of the point so I can’t really bust on it.  Still, I think it’s kind of silly that you would have a spaceship without any form of a thruster on it.  It seems rather dumb that anyone would leave the job of safely getting the ship and it’s crew to port using this ridiculous system of slinging yourself back and forth using gravity wells that are so strong they can actually suck asteroids out of their orbits and possibly into the very vessel you’re trying to save.  And who do they leave in charge of these incredible devices?  Some idiotic spaz who operates them like a 90-year-old operates a Cadillac, in this case played by me.

Don't worry if this pic doesn't make any sense to you. Just watch the trailer or play the game.

I kind of like these sort of games, but they all have the same problem of having difficulty spikes so sharp that could poke your eye out even if you’re standing behind ten feet of concrete.  I cruised through the first twenty or so stages with minimal effort, when suddenly my Xbox fired a magical brain-thickening beam into me that resulted in increased blood pressure and swearing.  Breezing past levels was replaced with getting stuck for upwards of thirty minutes, multiple time-outs so I could go cool off, and even one or two rage quits.

Sometimes the level design is so unforgiving that it can bring you to tears.  Not being a sadomasochist, I don’t really get off on stuff that is not pleasurable.  I did have quite a bit of fun with High Gravity Well early on, but once you reach your 100th death on a single level, it stops being entertainment and starts being fucking detention.  I’ve played a lot of games on Indie Gamer Chick which run out of fun before they run out stages, and it always leaves me unsure of how to ultimately tilt my review.  I didn’t finish High Gravity Well, having given up on the fourth stage of the fourth galaxy.  I realized that I had been playing the game on and off throughout the course of the day and hadn’t had fun in a few hours.  I think I can still honestly say that there’s a buck worth of good times to be had here, so give it a whirl.  But beware, because once things start to go bad, you’ll want to quit and do something else with your life.  But you might not be able to.   You’ll be trapped, oddly compelled to press on even as your life becomes an increasingly bleak and futile attempt to regain the glory moments when you were actually enjoying yourself.  Also known as “Broken Condom Syndrome.”

High Gravity Wells was developed by Stockton

80 Microsoft Points can’t count to 100 in the making of this review.

Pigs Can’t Fly

I think Don’t Feed the Trolls proved my argument that online leader boards (even the ghettoized peer-to-peer ones that are the only option for XBLIGs) can make the difference between a game being worth a purchase and a game that will run out of fun before you run out of demo time. Pigs Can’t Fly is the poster child for the latter.  It’s a scoring-driven reflex tester that’s not unlike the iPhone hit Tiny Wings.  And when I say not-unlike, I mean it’s damn near the same fucking game.  Replace a plump bird with a pig and voilà, you have Pigs Can’t Fly.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if you’re going to do this kind of clone, at least get the online scoring in it to give people a reason to keep playing.

Pigs Can’t Fly is slightly different from its iOS inspiration.  It’s still based on sliding up and down hills while trying to build up momentum by going from a glide into a dive at just the right moment.  The big difference here is the inclusion of power-ups that you can buy once you’ve collected enough stars while playing the game.  There is a booster, which gives you a little extra nudge.  I found this to be almost worthless.  I figured this would be handy if you fuck up the timing on a dive and lose all your speed.  But it doesn’t help you get up a hill all that much faster.  Once you’re on the other side of a hill, you should be able to start regaining speed on your own, and all using the boost then will do is cause you to splatter your piggy and lose your speed again.

There’s also a glide, which assists in your ability to fly, and a magnet that helps you suck up stars.  These do work, and are a welcome addition to the formula.  Still, the game isn’t all that well made.  Pigs Can’t Fly is pretty unforgiving with its timing.  Sometimes you’ll dive in what sure seems like the perfect spot to do so and end up losing all your velocity because the game registered you hitting a flat piece of turf, even if you’re nowhere near it.  Because of this, my previous guess that Pigs Can’t Fly would be a good game, at least for the kiddie set, seems invalidated as well.  As it turns out, pigs can neither fly nor star in a decent clone of a popular iOS title.  If this was Charlotte’s Web the writing in the web would say “Mmmmm, Bacon” and Charlotte would be laughing her sick ass off while Fern ate her former best friend.

There’s a visual that won’t be leaving my head anytime soon.

Pigs Can’t Fly was developed by Matt Mitman

80 Microsoft Points childishly sung “birdie birdie in the sky, why did you poopie in my eye?  It’s okay, I won’t cry.  I thank the lord that pigs don’t fly” in the making of this review. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

Devil Blood

Devil Blood is a homebrew first-person-shooter for the Virtual Boy in which you must.. wait, what?  This was an XBLIG?  Get the fuck out.

Kairi looks up what platform Devil Blood is on.

Well I’ll be damned, it was an XBLIG!  Huh.  I must have played the wrong game then, because the game I played had nothing but red in it.  Hold on, let me see what game I just played on my Virtual Boy.

Kairi leaves and it takes her 36 minutes to remember she doesn’t even own a Virtual Boy.

Well, this is awkward.  Allow me to start over.

Devil Blood is a first-person-shooter for XBLIG (I think) in which you navigate ten levels shooting floating demon-skull-thingies and, um, that’s pretty much it.  Every stage you encounter stronger skulls.  There’s only one skull-type per stage, each of which becomes more and more bullet-sponge like as you progress.  You’re equipped with two guns.  One is an assault rifle type thing  and the other is some useless elephant gun thingie that I never used because I decided to pour all my upgrade points into the rifle.

When you kill a skull, it will either drop souls or it will drop runes.  You can equip four runes at one time that will alter defense, mana recharge rate, or various spell effects.  I really didn’t pay too much attention to those either, because early into the game I skipped straight to the final boss stage and managed to pick up the three way-overpowered runes that were in the room with him.  Using those along with a fourth rune that recharged my mana faster, I was pretty much unstoppable.  I also ignored all the spells but the snowflake spell (aka Stasis), because it was the only thing that slowed down the enemies.  The only way the skull thingies attack you is by running up and touching you like they’re trying to give you herpes, so anything that slowed them down was a good thing.

Most of the time, the skulls drop souls, which is the game’s upgrade currency.  Using these, you can increase the potency of your gun or spells.  I spent most of the souls on gun strength, but each increased level added fuck all to the actual game.  The damn gun never seemed to get better.  I swear to God it was slower than watching actual evolution take place.  Or, if certain Christian scientists are to be believed, watching it not take place.

If you look at this picture with 3D glasses on, well, you'll look like a huge knob.

There are ten levels, but you can play them in any order.  So after a while I decided to just grind out the third level for an hour, building up my souls and upgrading my gun.  Once I had a level 20 rifle that could carry 100 bullets at a time with a level-4 firing rate, I skipped levels four through nine and went straight to the final boss, which is, you guessed it, a giant skull that tries to touch you.  Ewwwww, cooties!  Deciding that the best strategy would be to fire the stasis spell at it and nothing else, I would simply shoot at it, keep it nice and slow, step back, recharge my gun, and keep firing.  It worked, and I beat the game after firing about 10,000 bullets into it.  Rasputin was easier to kill than this thing was.

I was being slightly sarcastic about the whole Virtual Boy thing earlier.  In fact, there are brief moments where you see colors like green and blue.  The green is for the one exit that begins every stage.  The blue is for the runes and the spells that you shoot.  Otherwise, you have ugly red corridors, red enemies, a red gun, red bullets, red floors, and red ceilings.  Just look at the game play footage below (courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org) to see what I’ve had to deal with for the last couple hours.  You know, I never actually did play too much Virtual Boy.  I was six-years-old when it was released and the kiosk for it at Target had so many warning labels on it that my parents thought it would make my eyeballs explode.  But I have heard tales of it causing headaches, and I’m suddenly inclined to think that it wasn’t because of the 3D effects.  The reason being I got a nice one going while playing Devil Blood, along with the fact that my eyes really did start to hurt.  That’s no joke.

I’m not sure what the dude behind this game was thinking when he came up with this color scheme.  It’s not like the Virtual Boy did all that well, or was deserving of some kind of tribute.  I don’t even know if that was his intent at all, but it sure seemed like it.  Leaving the color scheme aside, Devil Blood is one stupidly brain-dead shooter.  The level design is poor, the enemy design is poor, the upgrade system is painfully slow, and it just plain fucking sucks.  AND YET, it grew on me, like a tumor.  Just like Send in Jimmy, I ended up finding Devil Blood oddly endearing.  Maybe its because I figured there would be more in the way of first-person-shooters on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and almost anything that is functional will stimulate that trigger-happy little part of my brain that almost got me to enlist when I was 18, before the coward section of my brain regained it’s footing.  I don’t know why but I started with a four-alarm level of hatred for this game and after about three hours I was kind of disappointed by how easily I was able to beat it.  Maybe I’ll go back and play those levels I skipped over.  Not bloody likely, but it could happen.  When pigs fly!  Hahaha!

Oh fuck off.

Devil Blood was developed by The Lost One

80 Microsoft Points think some Red Faction fan took the name too literally in the making of this review.

Don’t Feed the Trolls

To anyone who says that online leaderboards don’t make a difference and are unnecessary, I no longer have to call you an airheaded douchebag.  Nope, instead I can just point to Don’t Feed the Trolls and say “that.”  Without online  leaderboards, it’s a glorified minigame that you would play for about five minutes and then never touch again.  With them, it’s a glorified minigame that you’ll play for an hour or so trying to land a nice spot on the list.  And hell, you might even go back and try again later.  I would say that’s a significant difference.

Don’t Feed the Trolls is a reflex-tester.  The screen is divided into four sectors, one for each of the face buttons.  When a bear pops up, you hit the button that corresponds to the sector they’re standing in.  When a troll pops up, you hit the left stick in that direction to slap it.  Every level, a new type of bear or troll is thrown at you that slightly changes up the gameplay.  Okay, okay, it really is just a stupid minigame.  But I’ll be damned if it isn’t addictive.  This won’t be the type of game that you go back to again and again, but for a buck it’s a nice way to murder an hour.  Brian and I both groaned when the developer challenge for this arrived, but it wasn’t so bad.  In fact, there was no point where I wasn’t having a good time with Don’t Feed the Trolls.  So this gets my endorsement, as there’s nothing at all really wrong with it.  It’s not deep or complex, but it is fun, and that’s what should count.  Such a shame, because if I hated it I could have made so many awful jokes, like “This game is Un-BEAR-able” or “I know I get accused of TROLLing but this is ridiculous.”  Sigh, so many of my puns are victims of good games.  Light a candle in their honor tonight, and let us mourn.

The blue "Indie Games" tag is what truly is unBEARable. Booyah! Worked it in there!

Don’t Feed the Trolls was developed by Frozax Games

80 Microsoft Points forget about their worries and their strife in the making of this review.

Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved

Remember early last month when I reviewed Who Is God by Magiko Games?  It’s back.  Only it’s less sacrilegious, made by someone else, and it’s called Meep 2 – Meep Meep, Meep Meep.  Actually, it’s called Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved because otherwise the Warner Bros. people would be very upset.  And although it plays nearly identical to Who Is God, the graphics style and the game’s structure are completely different.  Otherwise, it’s still one of those “jump as high as you can get” type of games that have flooded the wireless market.  You play as a jelly-frog-thingie that is perpetually hopping around like he’s busting a kidney holding in a bladder full of piss.  Unlike Who Is God, this isn’t a randomly generated endless game.  There’s twenty levels filled with various traps and platforms.  There’s also items that can make you float automatically upwards, teleport you randomly in the level, or launch off in the opposite angle from which you hit them.

Meep 2 actually is a fun game.  It’s got clean graphics and a smooth soundtrack.  But it’s relatively low difficulty and lack of online leaderboards will make this a limited engagement.  To help out, it has local multiplayer, where you race a second player in split screen.  I didn’t get a ton of time with this mode, but it was okay.  Not spectacular or anything, and the limited view was aggravating.  Like many games I tackle for Indie Gamer Chick, Meep 2 is clearly designed with the kiddie crowd in mind.  Unlike some other titles that try that route, I actually think this will provide a decent level of entertainment while Mommy and Daddy are upstairs, um, talking sports.

My biggest complaint is the target times for earning trophies in each level.  Simply completing a stage will earn you the bronze trophy, which is all that is required to unlock the next level.  And thank God for that, because I could not get anything higher than a bronze.  I even tried replaying the first and thus most pussified level multiple times and for the love of all that is holy I couldn’t get so much as a silver award.  This is a pretty common problem on the scene.  Developers tend to lose track of reality because they’ve been playing their own product for so long that they become Gods at it.  Meanwhile, us mere mortals are left wondering what the hell they were thinking with these far-fetched challenge times.  I encountered similar problems in games like Pixel Blocked and Ninja360° and I still managed to have a good time with them.  And I did with Meep 2 as well.  Yet when I have trouble obtaining higher trophies, I always leave a game with the nagging feeling that maybe it’s really not too difficult and I’m as thick as a cinder block smoothy.  Nah, that can’t be it.  I’m fucking perfect.  Right?  Right?

Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved was developed by Andreas Heydeck

80 Microsoft Points listened to House of Pain in the making of this review.

Nuclear Wasteland 2030

I am emailing you to see if you would try one of our previous releases and see whether it deserves a spot on your top 10. As of September 23rd the game will have been out for an entire year so I know you may not even consider trying it. But it is the game’s anniversary and what better time to play it and see how it fares against today’s first person shooters!

The game is called Nuclear Wasteland 2030 and is a FPS and is available for 80 microsoft points. I have attached some links so you can glance at it and make your decision. Shame on you for not already having this game in your video game library.  I hope you give it a go!

Actually Rube, I already owned Nuclear Wasteland.  Brian found it while cruising around and said “hey, this looks fun!”   But I only played it about five minutes before life called me away for other things.  By time I got back, I had developer challenges lined up, and trust me when I say, never was I so thankful.  Five minutes were long enough to recognize that Nuclear Wasteland would be a total piece of shit.  I was going to chalk up the 80 points spent on it to the “this is the price of starting a review website” tax and never touch it again.

And then you had to challenge me to review it while asserting that it was a contender for the Leaderboard.  Thank you so very much.

So what can I say about Nuclear Wasteland?  Well, it’s horrible.  Oh my God, what a piece of shit game.  It could very well be one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games I’ve played yet.  It’s a wave shooter, where you play as some type of cowboy dude who has to run and take cover from swarming zombies who throw arms at you like a Clay Aiken concert was going on at the moment of zombification if you catch my drift.

You have a little pistol that you can use to fire on them.  It takes roughly six years for it to reload, and the zombies move like they’re in a Benny Hill skit, so once you run out of ammo you better be ready to hold down the clicker on the left stick to run.  No really, that’s how you run.  Convenient, huh?  Oh, and after a few waves you get access to a machine gun that runs out of bullets in about two seconds and takes about five seconds to reload.  You can also pistol whip by using the right stick’s clicker, but you have to walk into the zombies for it to work.  Funny enough, they can reach you just fine from a distance of about six paces, while you practically have to molest them to get close enough for the pistol-whipping to work.  But your dude swings like he’s encased in liquid nitrogen and thus by time you kill one zombie, the rest of the swarm is sure to have sissy-whipped you to death.  Or into shame.  Either way.

And then there’s the glitches.  They are kind of fun.  Like the one where a zombies pushed me through a wall, into a closed off room.  It was neato.  I could just take my time shooting the zombies in the head and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it.  Except after they decided to break the laws of physics as well and just passed through the fucking wall themselves, at which point my gun was rendered ineffective on the grounds that the zombies had brought an invisible wall with them and my bullets could not pass through it.  Their hands could though, and I was quickly deadified.

Upon respawning, the invisible forcefield wallthingie had followed me to the afterlife and back, because now every single shot I fired hit it.  Instead of just accepting that God wanted me to be zombie smörgåsbord, I took off running.  I didn’t make it very far before getting pinned up against a fence.  For a second, I thought I was fucked.  But then, I passed right through the fence and was apparently safe.  The zombies could not cross it, so I had some time to seek the high ground.  That damn reverse force field was still with me, so I couldn’t get off a shot, but hey, at least I safe.  I watched as a group of six zombies sat there flailing at the wall like they were trying to sharper their nails.  I turned my back for a split second to get a lay of the land, and when I turned back around the zombies had teleported across the fence and right into my face.  Quite the magic trick, really.

"The first step: figure out who the hell keeps putting all these gosh darn invisible walls up."

Needless to say, Nuclear Wasteland 2030 won’t be contending for the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, at least without the aid of nitrous oxide.  It’s glitchy, unresponsive, and not any fun.  Maybe first-person shooters and Xbox Live Indie Games aren’t the match made in Heaven I figured they would be.  People have told me that they’re extremely difficult to program and that it’s a small miracle developers can even get a functional build of one working.  In which case, I suppose Nuclear Wasteland is functional and that should count for something.  Maybe that will earn it the VIP treatment when we gather up all the really bad games and march them off to the gallows, which includes a complementary last meal and your final words being co-written by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Nuclear Wasteland 2030 was developed by Sick Kreations

80 Microsoft Points said “oh just Google him” in the making of this review.

Puzzled Rabbit

It’s Sokoban.  You shove boxes into spots.  I liked it.  You might not.  The end.

Puzzled Rabbit was developed by..

Okay, fine.  I’ll go into a little more detail.  It really is just Sokoban.  The presentation is tarted-up with nice graphics and music.  And for some reason they added this strange way of controlling where you click a box, and then click the spot on the screen you want to push the box.  They call this the “smart” control scheme.  I call it the lazy version for people who are afraid of schlepping.  You can still use the right analog stick to take direct control of the mover.

Otherwise, it’s exactly the same game that has been done a million times before.  If you’ve played games like this, you’ve played this one.  If you want a new version of it that has almost 200 levels, grab Puzzled Rabbit.  Well actually grab it on your iPad or Blackberry.  It’s a much bitter fit on those than on your television screen, which should be saved for stuff like Gears of War 3 or reruns of Scrubs.

Puzzled Rabbit was developed by Pixel Elephant

80 Microsoft Points can’t be bothered to make a Microsoft Points joke for this review in the making of this review.

President John America Saves America

Politics really should be left out of gaming. And yes, I did bust on Michelle Bachmann twice this week. But that wasn’t making fun of politics. That was making fun of spacey, gloried Stepford Wives that became politicians as the result of what I imagine was a drunken dare. Big difference. In general though, politics is just too much of a powder-keg topic. Gamers are already high-strung enough without throwing something into a conversation that even the most balanced families have banned from the dinner table.

I wasn’t sure at first if President John America Saves America was a parody or not. It’s so over the top with anti-Obamaisms, xenophobia, and pseudo-patriotism that I didn’t know what to make of it. Perusing the game’s Facebook page leads me to believe that the sentiment shown in the game is actually sincere, especially a bit where the developer busts on Obama for not dealing with the Mexican drug cartels. Right, because that stuff wasn’t going on during the eight years George W. Bush was president. Uh huh. So either the guys behind this are pulling off dead-pan humor a little too well or this game actually is the work of the types of irrational Teabaggers that caused me to leave the Republican party a few months back. Either way, the game’s theme is incredibly obnoxious and only the types of people on Sean Hannity’s mailing list will find any amusement out of it. So let’s drop the political talk and focus on the gameplay.

John America is a simulation game that occasionally sprinkles in some light side-scrolling shooting. You play as this Arnold Schwarzethingie-like dude who just got elected President of the United States. The country is in bad shape because, Heaven forbid, a black guy was in charge for four years and it’s a miracle there’s anything left of our once pure-blooded nation. So you have to go around the world, buying supplies low and reselling them high to pay off our national debt. A debt that we mostly have Ronald Reagan to thank for, but shhhhhhh, don’t tell the Tea Party that. It makes them cranky, especially before their nap time. Okay, I swear I’ll drop the politics now.

You know, if not for the grating message the game tries to send, this would actually be a fun little title. That’s what I would say if John America wasn’t an unintuitive nightmare. It tries to be a fast-paced simulation game, but everything about controlling it is so slow and clunky that it becomes a complete disaster. You move around a map of the world, pointing at various countries.  ou have to hold the trigger buttons down to enter a menu where you can choose to buy or sell supplies. From there, you have to click on the country you want to deal with (Africa counts as one country, which will only serve to further confuse Sarah Palin) and use the trigger buttons to move supplies back and forth. The problem is it’s too time-consuming to find out what every country charges for stuff. Some kind of list would be handy, instead of having to fly around from country to country to check out the current exchange rates.

Occasionally, a country (or continent, whatever the case may be) will have a little icon pop up requesting aid. In order to help them, you have to fly to the right side of the screen, click an icon that corresponds to the type of aid they want, and then go click on the country that needs it. This system fucking sucks.  The icons appear and disappear so fast that you literally have to react the moment they appear. But once you actually click the country to send them aid, an airplane flies out of the United States to bring them the shit they need. The only thing is, it actually doesn’t fly straight to the country that needs it. It flies around, makes a U-turn, and then drops the package off at the designated location. So, for example, if you try to send food to Mexico, the plane will leave the States, fly over Europe, and then swing over to Mexico. By time it gets there, the icon is usually gone. It’s stuff like this that makes me believe maybe the game really is a parody, because everything here is as inefficient as humanly possible. Yea, Obama might be black, but I bet he knows how to fly non-stop to Mexico without going 5,000 miles in the wrong direction. Sorry, I can’t resist.

You can also try to schmooze or strong-arm countries into giving you better exchange rates from time to time. This is done with a meter that bounces back and forth at a speed that’s determined by how much a different country loves or hates America. It only seemed to give me a marginally better exchange rate, but half the time I would try to do it, I would somehow get booted back onto the world map, even if I stopped the meter in exactly the right spot. There’s a lengthy tutorial but I still had no clue what I was doing half the time. Things just progress too quickly and any moments of clarity that I was able to gleam were thwarted by not possessing the God-like reaction times that are required to pull off certain actions.

From time to time, a terrorist will pop up on-screen. If you click on him, you enter a side-scrolling action scene. In order to really play this, you need to unlock various gizmos and weapons. It takes too long to save up enough cash to unlock these things, so if you click the dude you end up just flying around and getting shot at. When you do get weapons, all you’re left with is a really horrible shooter with poor collision detection and unresponsive controls. I’m not sure why they even bothered with it.

You win the game by eliminating the national debt. Consequently, you lose the game if you piss off the rest of the world enough, at which point they all just nuke us back to the stone age. This can be accomplished by bombing or invading other countries. I never really came close to winning the game.  John America proved to be one of those rare titles that I just gave up on. The controls are horrible, the layout confusing, and I couldn’t help shake the nagging feeling that I was somehow contributing to the fall of my own country by playing it. I don’t know how President John America plans to save America, because it’s a completely incoherent mess.

I hear the Republicans have it eyed for the 2012 Vice-Presidential nomination.

President John America Saves America was developed by Maverick Games

240 Microsoft Points approved this message in the making of this review.

Grand Theft Froot (Second Chance with the Chick)

Fun fact: the very first developer challenge I received way back in the dark days of IndieGamerChick.com (also known as this last July) was for Grand Theft Froot.  Go ahead and go read the review for it really quick so that you can understand why this follow-up was needed.  Just click here for that review.  I’ll amuse myself by doing shadow puppets.  Ooooh, look, I made a ducky.

Did you read it?  Okay, good.  I actually came up with the idea for Second Chance with the Chick because the guys at Frooty Game Studios were so damn nice about my review, especially considering that I called them “Indian givers dispensing fun.”  To my surprise, this actually became a trend.  I figured I would become public enemy #1 among Xbox Live Indie Game developers.  Instead, even the guys whose games I slammed thanked me for my frankness and asked for advice to help improve their games.  Funny enough, the cheerleader squad tends to be more upset with my negative reviews than the developers.  Thus we have humorous situations where I open dialog with a game’s designer to talk about design theory and ways to open up Xbox Live Indie Games to a more mass market.  And while this is going on, Sue Sylvester is off in the background telling them that they ought to sue me.

On a side note, Nate and Hurley over at Gear-Fish have pretty damn good reviews too, that are often biting and hilarious.  They’re very Chick-like.  Which actually sounds insulting now that I think about it.  I meant to say they review like girls.  I mean like me.  Sigh, I’ll just shut up now and get to the Grand Theft Froot review.

The first time around, I thought Grand Theft Froot was loaded with potential, but was way too problematic to give a positive review for.  The guys at Frooty Game Studios and myself have since talked very often about their experience in designing GTF.  They also stayed busy by tweeking their game with patches.  Because of them, I created the Second Chance.  And then I waited.  And waited.  And waited.

Two months and 1,682,344 patches later (give or take), Grand Theft Froot finally was finished being mended and ready for its do-over.  Was it worth the wait?  Mostly, yes.  Since the previous review included a laundry list of problems, I’ll just go over them one by one.

Original Problem: The story and dialog pop up in the middle of the game, obscuring the play field.

Current Build: What I called a “dick move extraordinaire” is still present in the game, but now it’s moved to the beginning of each level.  This is better, but not by much.  Occasionally the beginning of a stage will still feature enemies who charges on you.  If Frooty Game Studios had it to do over again, they tell me they would have gone with full voice acting.  Unfortunately they didn’t and the game still suffers greatly from it.  Ironically, they did manage to write a really compelling storyline for GTF that many people will completely skip because of this paint-huffingly stupid design choice.  Live and learn.

This is still the biggest bonehead design choice I've seen yet.

Original Problem: There was no reason to alternate between your gun’s different strengths.

Current Build: This is actually a design choice that would make the game harder, but in a strategic, professional sort of way.  And they did fix it.  Now, the power shots drain your gun faster, which means you do have to switch up between the two levels of firepower.

Original Problem: When you die, you retained any experience points you earned but lost any gold collected.

Current Build: You keep the gold now too.  This cuts out the need to grind levels repeatedly so that you can purchase items from the shop.  Again, another step in the right direction.

Original Problem: Acid and/or lava pits drain too much of your health and might as well have been an instant kill.

Current Build: Damage ratios have been altered so that the pits will take your health but leave you with a fighting chance.

Original Problem: There are too many cannons that you can’t defend against, all that shoot in seemingly random patterns.

Current Build: You can shoot the cannons, temporarily disabling them.  This is the biggest game changer the guys at Frooty Game Studio made, and in a way it completely alters the flow of the game.  Without this last-second addition, Grand Theft Froot likely still would have been relegated to “meh” status for all eternity.  Instead, this turned a game that can drag at times into a more fast-paced and thus fun title.

Original Problem: There were no maps for the sprawling levels.

Current Build: Still no maps.  God damn it so much.

In my original review, I said that if Grand Theft Froot had one or two of its problems fixed, it would be one of the better games on the marketplace.  Of course, I said that way back when IndieGamerChick.com was just getting off the ground, and I hadn’t really played all that many Indie games.  The truth is, Grand Theft Froot is not one of the best games on the marketplace.

BUT, it is vastly improved and the playability and fairness level of it have been fixed enough that I can now safely give gamers the go ahead to give this a purchase.  Hell, they even added some extra secrets and a new ending for those who played through it once already.  Grand Theft Froot is a pretty decent game that offers lots of action, exploration, and challenge.  Everything that was positive about the original build still shines here.  The awesome level design.  The engaging storyline.  And the ability to see a developer that oozes with potential.  GTF was a very ambitious first effort by Frooty Game Studios.  If any lesson can be learned from them, it’s that developers likely should start with something more simple.  Don’t jump into the deep end of the pool on your first day of swimming lessons.  Of course, if you do manage to make a coherent and playable epic your first time around like the Frooty people did, gamers will salivate while anticipating what you’ll come up with next.  I’m not so much worried anymore that their next game will turn out to be Froot Nukem Forever.  Maybe it’ll be more like Frootblivion.

Grand Theft Froot was developed by Frooty Game Studios

80 Microsoft Points are guessing Sue Sylvester will be contacting Bethesda in their latest pitiful attempt to get IndieGamerChick.com shut down in the making of this review.

Johnny Platform Saves Christmas

First off, yea, I know the title is technically “Johnny Platform Saves Xmas” but I always hated the whole “Xmas” thing.  Are the extra five letters needed to spell Christmas that hard?  Jesus H. X, what the hell is wrong with society?  This wouldn’t be a problem is Xians weren’t so damn prudish about saying the name of their savior like he’s fucking Voldemort or something.

Anyway, as those who read my review of Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp know, I put out a call on Twitter looking for a challenger for the IndieGamerChick.com leaderboard.  It’s already been a great month for shaking up the board, with not one but two top contenders for LaserCat’s crown, along with a hot online shooter that will likely rank somewhere.  Needless to say, the board on October 1 will look very different.  Still, I wanted to make sure that games that existed on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace  before I started Indie Gamer Chick had a fair shot at making the cut.  I asked for nominations and the Pudgy-Pidge of the XBLIG scene, Chounard, recommended Johnny Platform Saves Christmas.  In about two minutes this had enough people backing him up to make it the game to play.  Well, just as soon as I played the original.  Which I did.  I reviewed it.  I liked it.  You should read the review.  You should then buy it.  And then thank me for the recommendation.  And bake me some cookies.  Oatmeal, not chocolate chip.

JP Saves Christmas is done in the same style as the original, with single-screen platforming-puzzles peppered with some hop ‘n’ bop action thrown in.  Having said that, the sequel truly is a huge evolution over the original.  I’ll start with the puzzle design.  In the original, most of the levels were fairly straight forward and pretty easy.  In Christmas, the puzzles are much more elaborate and feature multi-step solutions that require some level of brain power to solve.  It’s still not overly difficult, but it’s a big step up.  This time around there’s 100 levels instead of 55, so it’s almost double the value as well.

Because when I think of Christmas, I think of Egypt.

Like any good sequel, Christmas also ups the abilities of our hero.  Now, in addition to a double jump, the ability to roll has been added.  You can use either the bumpers or the triggers to do this.  You can also double jump out of a roll to clear larger gaps.  On top of all that, you can roll off an enemy you just bopped to death.  And the guys at Ishisoft really made the most of this, centering many puzzles around the rolling mechanics.

Also new is elements like bombs, ice, and hot coals with puzzles themed around using them.  Okay, so it’s not exactly the most creatively designed game, but every cliché is used well and the end result is one of the best puzzlers on the marketplace.  No, stop!  Don’t leave.  It’s an action-platform-puzzler.  You know, the kind anyone can play, instead of stuff like Blockt that are designed with the Mensa crowd in mind.

The problems that were found in the original Johnny Platform also make a triumphant return.  The lives and checkpoint system that exists only because Gus had not yet been invented is back.  And it’s more annoying than ever now because the stages take longer to complete.  So if you’re one stage away from a checkpoint and you game over, you have to replay the previous four levels again.  Well that’s just busy work.  I don’t know why people even bother to include them anymore.  Limited lives are a relic, with the only logical use for them that still makes sense is having them in games that center around high scores.  Neither of the Johnny Platform games have a scoring system, so the lives function is completely worthless and only serves to add tedium to a game that would otherwise be devoid of it.  That or there actually is a minimum badness quota for Indie games and including lives helped the series meet that demand.

And once again the difficult curve is all over the map, only now it’s more noticeable.  One stage will be a total mind-bender and it will be followed by a couple of levels that the preschool crowd would consider to be a leisurely stroll through.  Not to sound like a broken record, but this really does seem to be a common problem with Xbox Live Indie Games.  The solution is obvious: developers need to leave games in play-testing longer and ask for honest feedback regarding level-progression and the difficulty curve.  And to you play-testers, don’t tell the developers the curve is perfect when it’s not.  You’re not going to hurt anyone’s feelings with the truth.  That’s my job.

Still, those gripes were the same ones I had for the original game, and they make as little difference to the enjoyability for this one as that one.  Score one for Chounard and the rest of the Twitter Twits, because Johnny Platform Saves Christmas is one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games out there.  I know I’ve said that a lot this month, and most people don’t come here to watch me to sing the praises of games, but I have to call them like I see them.  JP Saves Christmas is awesome, and you should buy it. Yes, it’s a contender for a spot on the leaderboard.  Then again, maybe not.  I mean new games are flying at me so fast that who knows if there will be room for it?

No, I’m not going soft.  I’m still the spiteful critic that developers outright tell me they’re terrified of.  (Side note: the poor guy behind Cute Things Dying Violently had a full-blown panic attack when I told him I had began playing his game.  Jesus X guys, I’m not that tough to please!)  And I’ll prove it to you all.  What I need is a game so incredibly horrible that it defies the laws of reason.

Yep, that should do.

Johnny Platform Saves Christmas was developed by Ishisoft Games

80 Microsoft Points got run over by a reindeer in the making of this review.